----- Original Message ----- From: "Russell Chapman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, February 14, 2002 9:06 PM Subject: Re: topple Hussein
> The day that the US stops spending untold billions in preventing free > trade, we will happily sell our wheat to more deserving markets. Since we >can produce wheat at a much lower price than the US, it shouldn't be hard, but >we don't have the cash to compete with your dumping, so we sell wherever we can get >a good price. Quite simply, we need the lamb and wheat sales in the middle >east to survive. I'm missing something here. Where is the untold billions is subsidy? The only place that I see a direct subsidy is the export-import bank. At http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2001/amndsup.html it is given at around 700 million dollars. The export import bank is desribed as "The official export credit agency of the US Govenment. The Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) is an independent U.S. Government agency that helps finance the overseas sales of U.S. goods and services." http://www.financemag.com/guide/c082/c082090.htm Since this isn't all farm subsidy, the farm subsidy is probably quite a bit smaller than that. I can't imagine that the markets are that overwhelmed by whatever fraction of this money is devoted to farm export subsidies. Indeed, lets look at US farm exports. At http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/01statab/stat-ab01.html we have the following export numbers, rounded to the nearest billion: Wheat: 3 billion Sugar 0 billion (actual number 3 million) Corn 5 billion Soy 7 billion Veggies 7 billion Animal Feed 4 billion Total: 50 billion For the life of me, I can't see why 700 in export subsidies million spread over all exports (worth about 1.4 trillion dollars) will really affect Australia all that much. I also don't understand why Australian farm products should be inherently much cheaper than US farm products. US farms are quite productive and the soil is usually pretty good. The climate seems to be better for farming in the US than in Australia. Why should Australia have a cost advantage. (I'm not saying it doesn't, but simply that I don't see why it would.) Dan M. Dan M.
